Rick Garnett & Barack Obama

I suggested in an e-mail to Rick that his posting earlier today might be misleading:  Jonathan Alter (Newsweek) said that Barack Obama should stand up to the teachers' unions, not that he should support school vouchers.  (Standing up to the teachers' unions doesn't entail support for school vouchers.)

Well, it now appears that Sen Obama has stood up to the teachers' unions.  According to the (editorially-conservative) New York Sun (here):

Mr. Obama ... ha[s] aroused a mix of excitement from those who push for extensive change in public schools and skepticism from traditional union members who oppose the so-called reform policies, such as charter schools and plans to tie teacher pay to student test scores....

Mr. Obama ... raised concerns when he endorsed the idea of "merit pay" at a convention last year for the other national teachers union, the National Education Association.

In his address to the NEA this year, he acknowledged that the idea "wasn't necessarily the most popular part of my speech last year," but vowed to stand by it, eliciting some boos.

He also stood by the idea in his speech to the AFT convention yesterday, which he made via satellite from San Diego.

"When our educators succeed, I won't just talk about how great they are; I will reward them for it," Mr. Obama said. He listed several cases in which districts could give teachers a salary increase, including if they serve as mentors; if they learn new skills, and if they "consistently excel in the classroom."

Those at the AFT convention said that no boos followed the remarks, though some union members later said they were concerned by them.

"That was the one statement that raised our eyebrows," the president of the AFT's Los Angeles chapter, A.J. Duffy, said yesterday. "Our question is what does that mean, 'who consistently do well in classrooms,' and based upon whose guidelines? Is it a principal, a test score? We're going to continue to have dialogue with him."